Police In Nepal Fear Man-Eating Leopard Has Killed 15 People

A ferocious leopard may have killed 15 people in Nepal in a 15-month span, its latest victim a 4-year-old boy that the creature dragged away into the jungle to eat.

The head of boy was found in the forest a kilometer from his home Saturday morning, said Kamal Prasad Kharel, the police chief of the Baitadi district, an area about 600 kilometers (373 miles) west of Kathmandu.

The grisly discovery, which came after teams of people searched for the child, marks the 15th victim in the past 15 months in that remote district in western Nepal.

The police chief suspects that a single man-eating leopard is responsible for the deaths. If not, there are at most two of the man-eating creatures around, he believes.

Maheshwor Dhakal, an ecologist at the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation in Kathmandu, agreed that it is unusual to find more than one or two man-eating animals in one area. Most leopards live on wild prey.

Why are the leopards eating humans you ask?

“Since human blood has more salt than animal blood, once wild animals get the taste of salty blood they do not like other animals like deer,” Dhakal said.

Oh, so we’re just tastier than deers and whatnot, gotcha…SMH

Of the 15 victims in Nepal so far, two-thirds are children below the age of 10. The others are older children and a 29-year-old woman who had gone to collect fodder for domestic animals in the nearby forest, a common practice in Nepal…

…”In the case of the children it just leaves behind the head, eating everything, but some parts of the adult body are left behind because it cannot finish it,” Kharel added.

That is as sad as it is digusting. Hopefully they find this leopard before he drags some little kid in the woods on some Sandusky isht.